


No Consciousness of Guilt

by Fjm



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 18:41:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11606640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fjm/pseuds/Fjm
Summary: I have never liked the role of the house elves in HP, but I had assumed that Harry Potter would come down from the mountain top at the end of the last book, and declare the elves free. But that didn’t happen. This is based on a piece of American history.





	No Consciousness of Guilt

Dobby stood at the foot of the scaffold. The stairs above him looked all the more steep for having been constructed for a species other than his own.

It had never been meant to come to this. Dobby had been very grateful to Master Harry for his freedom, and for his clothes, and when he couldn’t find work—that had puzzled him, didn’t everyone want a house elf of their own?—Harry had helped him get settled into Hogwarts. He had played his part in the overthrow of Lord Voldemort, and he had watched and looked and learned, and eventually he realised he was picking up some wand magic.  
Hagrid had been horrified.  
“Dobby! They’ll lock you away! They’ll put you down! You know non-humans aren’t supposed to do wand magic! They only let me because I’m half human.”  
Winkie was terrified when she found out that Dobby was teaching some of the younger house elves in the pantry late at night.  
“Walls have ears, Dobby.” She whispered, looking at the skirting boards where there were, indeed, rows of ears (some of them with little earings) carved into the wood, which twitched if they spoke too loud. But she brought his little class milk and cookies, treated them almost as if they were human children, and one day, Dobby caught her tentatively stroking a wand. A few days later, she came to class with some of the elderly house elves. He assumed at first that the more servile and broken of them came from the households of Voldemort’s supporters and was shocked when he discovered how many served some of the most respected families in the land. After a few months, and after seeing the patterns of flinches and hearing the ways in which they referred to themselves and to each other, Dobby stopped being surprised at anything. Instead, he began to get angry.  
One day two of his pupils didn’t turn up. The next day three. A few days later, there was a report in The Daily Prophet that several house-elves had been found “playing” with wands. They had been punished, and a long editorial and comment followed about the need for Wizards to care properly for their house-elves and ensure that dangerous implements were kept locked up.  
After that, new house-elves were told not to give their real names. There were still the occasional arrests—except that they couldn’t be arrests because house-elves weren’t human—but no one could give anyone else away. And for some reason they were all very good about protecting Dobby. Other incidents began creeping into the page of The Daily Prophet.  
The problem was the issue of clothes. Only a master giving a house elf clothes could free the elf. But what if the master, or the master’s house, wasn’t there any more? Two years almost to the day he started his class, the first house burned down.  
Dobby wasn’t sure when he realised who the culprit was. It seemed such a huge journey from weeping over her lost slavery to burning houses, but when he did, he knew what he had to do. There was a hunt on. Dobby thought about it, and realised that there were at least four elves in his class who were already better than him. They could teach the class. But Dobby couldn’t do the next bit, he didn’t have the hard edge that she had acquired through living with years of betrayal. And if Dobby had learned one thing from Harry (he heard the absent “Master” in his head) and Harry’s parents. it was the value of a martyr. He wrote two short notes, one to Hagrid—he could trust Hagrid to want to save his own status enough to go straight to the authorities—and another to the one human he had ever heard express concern. She was a writer now, and as passionate as ever. She’d visit him in jail.

Dobby’s body lies a mouldering in the grave but his soul goes marching on.


End file.
